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Electric Smart

We're getting our first drive in the 2013 Smart ForTwo Electric Drive today, and Smart just announced pricing for the latest version of its all-electric minicar. The starting price for the ForTwo ED Coupe will be $25,000 (*plus delivery fees), making it the lowest price electric vehicle in the U.S. from a mainstream automaker – and that doesn't even include the available $7,500 federal tax credit.

As of today, buyers in Germany will be able to order the new, third-generation Smart Fortwo Electric Drive in either coupe or cabriolet versions. The all-electric models started production in late 2009. What's interesting is that the all-electric coupe will be available for either 18,910 euros ($23,625 U.S. at today's exchange rates) plus a 65-euro-a-month ($81) battery lease or you can flat out buy the car for 23,680 euros ($29,586). The cabrio models cost 22,000 euros ($27,486) with the lease

The EVTV team has recently finished electrifying their sweet '57 Porsche 356A Speedster replica and will soon be sending it off to their "roller" supplier, Special Editions Inc., for further testing and inspection. With that project in the can, they are ready to try something new. The projects that they have undertaken to date have been relatively expensive – $50,000 and up – and so it has been decided that the next vehicle to be lavished with batteries and an electric motor will be

According to Autocar in the UK, Scotland Yard has announced plans to replace half of its fleet of vehicles with either electric or air-powered vehicles within four years. We're not sure what air-powered vehicles are being considered, but we've been hearing about the compressed air vehicle from MDI for the last few years at least.

Chalk this one firmly in the rumormill category, but Johnathan Bodily over at Street Import Online is reporting that he's seen what appears to be an electric smart fortwo at Tesla's facility in San Carlos plugged into a Tesla-branded charging station. What's more, this particular smart differed from other fortwos in that it lacked a tail pipe. We know that Daimler has been running second-generation smart ed's (with lithium ion batteries from an unknown source) around various locations for a litt

While some sites are busy making fun of its name (yeah, we thought of that too... and you? Does it matter? Comments are welcome), others were busy conducting interviews with Dr. Z. in an attempt to find out when we may see the smart ED in America. The answer is that it's coming, if not next year then shortly thereafter. Daimler hopes to have 1,000 electric smarts running rather silently around the world by the end of next year, and it's distinctly possible that a portion of them will be in the U

A few weeks back I did some informed but utterly unconfirmed speculation about the nature of the deal that Tesla Motors had struck with Daimler. Of the two scenarios that I posited, the more likely was that Tesla would be supplying lithium ion battery packs to Daimler for use in the electric version of the Smart ForTwo. The German edition of the Financial Times today has a story on the expansion of Daimler's test fleet of battery powered Smarts from London into Berlin and other cities. In the st

Smart currently has an electric version of its little ForTwo runabout... um, running about in Europe known as the Smart ed. Using a a sodium-nickel-chloride (commonly called a Zebra) battery, the 41 horse electric motor has plenty of power to move the vehicle around, and urban performance is actually said to be improved over the standard model. So far, the electric smart has only been for testing, but that looks to be changing rather soon. According to Dieter Zetsche, a fully electric ForTwo wil

Smart has been field testing a fleet of battery-powered ForTwo ED models in Britain for several months. Now Auto Motor und Sport out of Germany is reporting that an updated version could begin testing in the U.S. as early as 2009. The current model uses high temperature sodium-nickel-chloride Zebra batteries. The new generation will switch to a lithium ion pack and could be tested in the Los Angeles area. There are no specs available at the moment, but Smart's Anders Jensen has said that if the